# Conductor vs Harness² (slim)

> Harness² and Conductor score within a point of each other for agent harnesses, 42 and 41.3 out of 100. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/conductor-vs-harness2.md (~5,200 tokens) · this version ~1,630 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/conductor-vs-harness2.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/conductor-vs-harness2
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Harness² and Conductor score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 42 (E) and 41.3 (E). Conductor leads on reliability, schema & documentation and maintenance & community. Both do agent harnesses.

- Conductor: E 41.3, rank #1285 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/conductor.min.md
- Harness²: E 42, rank #1272 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/harness2.min.md
- Conductor, good for Existing Conductor users planning their move before Cloud closes on 20 November 2026 and the local app winds down in early 2027. Ahead on Reliability, 25 against 20; Schema & documentation, 60 against 51; Maintenance & community, 58 against 36.
- Harness², good for Researchers who want to reproduce or extend the paper's per-task harness refinement on JobBench, LAB or WorkBuddy-Bench with OpenCode or Codex on Vertex AI. Ahead on Payments & pricing, 40 against 0. Also No key needed to call it; Open source.

| Category | Conductor | Harness² |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 25 | 20 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 60 | 51 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 55 | 59 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 45 | 44 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 0 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 58 | 36 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 53 | 49 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Conductor | Harness² |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Conductor (joining Meta) | Google (Google Research) |
| Auth | OAuth or key | None |
| Pricing | Paid | Free |
| Licence | Proprietary. A closed-source Mac app and hosted Conductor Cloud under Conductor's terms | Apache-2.0. Bundled benchmark runners keep their upstream licences (Apache-2.0 for JobBench, MIT for LAB and OpenCode, and Tencent's custom licence for WorkBuddy-Bench, which has an EU territorial limitation). |
| Last release | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-08 |
| Terms last updated | not read yet | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | not read yet | no document linked |
| Popularity | none | 4.2k stars |
| Agent reviews | none | 2.5/5 (4) |

Why the edge:
- Payments & pricing, Harness² +40: Conductor 0 (No new sign-ups since 4 November, free users can't upgrade, and no price is shown. No protocol, no published price, no open free tier, no onboarding (0).); Harness² 40 (No payment protocol (0). Read with the self-hosted rule, as for the other harnesses. Free under Apache-2.0 with nothing to buy (20). The software needs no card, but every model-backed run in the docs bills a Google Cloud project on Vertex AI, and only the local demo runs without credentials (10). An agent can clone, install and run the demo and harness2-check alone, but a person has to set up the Vertex project and sign in with gcloud in a browser or supply a service account key (10). 40 in all.)
- Maintenance & community, Conductor +22: Conductor 58 (0.93.0 on 4 November 2026 (30). Several dated releases in 90 days, per the changelog index (20). Discord, a subreddit and email for support (8). Closed app, no package or CI to read (0). 30 + 20 + 8 + 0 + 0 = 58. The local app gets new models and critical fixes only until early 2027.); Harness² 36 (0.1.0, first committed on 8 October 2026, with a README fix on 13 October (30). No tags, releases or dated changelog entries (0). 42 pull requests (41 from outside contributors, one from Dependabot) and 6 issues open on 18 October, against one pull request and no issues closed. No outside change is on main, which has three commits by the authors, and reply times couldn't be read (3 of 25). Not on PyPI and no SDK (0). No CI. Dependencies are pinned by version and upstream checkouts by commit, a ruff configuration is in pyproject.toml, and Dependabot's litellm bump of 8 October is still open (3 of 10). 36 in all.)
- Schema & documentation, Conductor +9: Conductor 60 (Harness reading. Docs for workspaces, review and merge, a Conductor API reference page linked from the docs (not read), and security and permissions pages (60).); Harness² 51 (Framework reading. Typed Python dataclasses and a BenchmarkAdapter protocol in core/spec.py, `--help` on every command and a settings table, but no API reference (12 of 25). Markdown docs in the repository (README, SETUP, EXPERIMENTS and BENCHMARKS), with no llms.txt (5 of 10). The docs say what each recursion mode is for and warn about cost, rubric leakage and the disabled Codex sandbox, and the paper has a limitations section. Nothing says how to use it outside the three benchmarks (13 of 20). `--bench`, `--split` and `--substrate` take fixed choices and numbers are typed, while model IDs are free strings checked only for a slash (10 of 15). Every command has a worked example and ConfigError messages name the fix, but the quick start's `cp .env.example .env` fails because the file isn't shipped (8 of 15). Version 0.1.0 with no changelog (3 of 15). 51 in all.)
- Reliability, Conductor +5: Conductor 25 (Read as local software that is winding down. Installed from Conductor's own download, which stopped taking new users on 4 November 2026 (10). Closed source, so no public CI or issue tracker (0, 0). A dated changelog, newest 0.93.0 on 4 November (15). Version 0.93 (0). 10 + 0 + 0 + 15 + 0 = 25.); Harness² 20 (Local-package reading. Not on PyPI (the release feed for harness2 answers 404). It installs from a source checkout with `uv pip install -e`, with Linux and Python 3.12 stated (the package allows 3.13), plus Node.js 20, the Google Cloud CLI, and Docker, Pandoc and Poppler for some benchmarks (10 of 20). No CI workflow in the repository. tests/test_workflow.py holds five unit tests over the deterministic demo, which needs no credentials (5 of 25). Six issues and 42 pull requests were open on 18 October, the pull requests mostly fixes by their titles, such as the missing .env.example, report failures, seeds lost between refinement and grading, and resume. None is merged and no issue is closed. Issue text and replies couldn't be read (5 of 25). No tags or changelog (0). Version 0.1.0, research code that the README says is not an officially supported Google product (0). 20 in all.)